Political Scene: The Economics of Uprisings

Bahrain “has always been seen as incredibly stable,” John Cassidy says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. “So I think it is significant that the violence has spread to there, and it shows that underlying a lot of these problems, there are big economic and ethnic issues.”

Cassidy, who has a piece in next week’s magazine about the economies of the Arab world, talks with Ryan Lizza and the host, Dorothy Wickenden, about the economic roots and implications of the uprisings. As the situation in Bahrain shows, “just having oil, it seems, isn’t enough to guarantee stability anymore,” he says. And in Tunisia and Egypt, where the living standards “have about doubled in the last twenty years,” Cassidy says that “to some extent what we’re seeing there is a product of success.” Because the education system has expanded so quickly there,

You’ve got all these young kids basically sitting around with no jobs, and they’re not just peasants or laborers like they used to be twenty, thirty years ago. Some of them are quite well-educated. And it’s always the case, going back to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, all revolutions, that the real danger for a regime comes when the middle class gets alienated.

He goes on,

In Egypt, it seems to me, what ultimately brought Mubarak down was not the fact that the poor rural people were suffering, but that he couldn’t satisfy the demands of what is becoming an educated middle class. That’s not really a story about Islam, it’s a story about economics.